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Why Do The Labels Continue To Insist That 'Your Money Is No Good Here?'

• deleted 15y ago
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• iamben 15y ago
  This article is going to be written over and over until someone finally takes the step and creates a way for people to download something conveniently (easy to find/quick to download/no DRM), cheaply and legally.
  • jwr 15y ago
    This article has already been written many times. I wrote it once back in 2009: http://jan.rychter.com/enblog/2009/9/17/why-i-will-steal-music.html http://jan.rychter.com/enblog/2009/9/17/why-i-will-steal-mus... Things have moved forward since then, but very slowly.
    • iamben 15y ago
      Yeah, Spotify was a huge leap forward, although it's not perfect by any means. TV and film is as dreadful as it ever was.
      • slyall 15y ago
        If I go to www.spotify.com it redirects to http://www.spotify.com/int/ http://www.spotify.com/int/ and the following message comes up: " Spotify is currently not available in New Zealand. Enter your email address to be first in line when we launch! " Which isn't exactly solving the problem...
      • jwr 15y ago
        Spotify does not want my money (I live in Poland).
  • astral303 15y ago
    If you look at the site referenced, Juno, it does let you quickly and conveniently download WAVs without any DRM, easy to find and all. Cheaply. And legally. But not for everyone. The question is that you are prohibited from doing so due to B.S. licensing issues described in TFA.
    • iamben 15y ago
      Sure, except that site misses lots of music I'd normally download or listen to (or find on Spotify). And the convenient/legal/cheap argument applies to music/tv/film.
  • c0ur7n3y 15y ago
    Unfortunately for society, the middlemen whom that would put out of business are doing everything in their power to make sure that never happens.
• guylhem 15y ago
  This is the single best article I've read here. It is just spot on. A small example: approximately 10 years ago, when I lived in mainland france I purchased all my DVDs by dvdexpress.com because it just removed all these problems. Then they went express.com and added restrictions, and thus lost my business. I am the customer. I want an item. I will pay for it. If you don't let me buy it, I will find a mean to get it anyway. You will just lose the opportunity to make good money on the transaction, and infuriate me for the time lost in doing your work - finding a way to get me the stuff I want. Some people believe artificial restrictions from the last centuries still matter. In this day and age, they don't. They are just problems to be solved or worked around by innovatives companies. Any company that does this get the money. Itunes did a lot of things wrong, and has many of these issues left, but at the moment it provides the most gracious experience for the customer. The company that will manage to find a way to circumvent all these blocks to satisfy the customer on other IP items (Ex: music, books, newspaper) will get the best advantage there can in the market: customer satisfaction. At the moment my money is on google music's cheap mp3, but even more the kindle ebooks- because you can change the country settings in just a mouse click. The company has the right scale to try and sign some worldwide agreement, or try to strongarm companies or governments that may stand in the way. I wish them the best of luck to satisfy us - the customers.
• noarchy 15y ago
  As someone living in Canada, I can VPN my way through the IP barriers. So that isn't an issue for me. But when it comes to paying, they sometimes still don't want my money if they see a Canadian address. There is definitely something wrong with a business model that must function this way.
  • DngrZnExpswy 15y ago
    The VPN system, while it works, is a barrier for most people and should not be considered anything more than skating with a broken ankle, because while you may win the Stanley Cup, you still have a broken ankle. It is only a solution for the elite and desperate and a symptom of the fact that the game is too rough, and may require the rules to be changed. (that analogy proved to be far more useful than I had hoped)
• starfox 15y ago
  This reminds me of when Fred Wilson pirated the Knicks game because nobody let him pay for it: http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2012/01/screwcable.html http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2012/01/screwcable.html
• cstross 15y ago
  Publishers do not manufacture content; they buy licenses to reproduce content created by artists (authors, musicians, whatever) and sell copies of it to retail customers. These licenses are often encumbered with legal restrictions because the creators (via their agents) can get more money by subdividing the rights. This isn't specific to music. I can speak from personal experience about novels. A common form of encumbrance is territorial rights; for example, when I sell the rights to publish my novels to my publishers, I only sell them the right to publish in a specific language, and in specified territories. I can't get more money from a publisher by offering them world English language rights rather than, by splitting US/Canadian and UK/rest of world rights and selling them to different local publishers. (In fact, if I sell world rights to a US publisher, they won't sell the ebooks around the world -- they'll merely re-sell UK rights to a British publisher, who will maintain the territorial split. Because there are still no truly global publishers, despite individual members of the Big Six trying to operate on a global scale.) So I split the rights and sell them separately. As noted by, well, just about everyone, this makes little or no sense in the internet age. Unfortunately trying to get book contracts re-drafted so that e-book rights are global and non-exclusive is, shall we say, an exercise in pain (we're talking about getting publishing house lawyers involved: do I need to say any more?). So that's why it persists in ebooks, and it's pretty much the same story with other forms of content. That's why this goes on. It'll probably continue for a few more years before truly global distributors show up and the existing system collapses under its own weight.
  • sounds 15y ago
    Pedantic quote from the article: "Tell me (and Barassi) why this sort of thing happens. If your answer includes words like 'licensing,' 'rights' or any other explanation of the convoluted system that the labels themselves set up to prevent people from purchasing their music, your answer, while 'technically correct,' is completely wrong." In other words, who cares? The artists (as a general body) do not care even the slightest if I live in a foreign country. The customers don't care what country the artist was in when they created their work. That leaves the middlemen - who are increasingly irrelevant precisely because they are providing no value to either side.
    • 15y ago
• earbitscom 15y ago
  I think what people in some of these countries don't realize is that there is not a big enough financial incentive to do the legal work required to bring certain artists to those regions. The amount if would cost to get those agreements done, setup distribution, collect, pay royalties on a tiny amount of sales is just not worth it. I know, I know...everybody will say that the labels shouldn't complain when they fail to bring music to a market and those people pirate the music. At the end of the day, you're not entitled to everything everyone else has. To think so is just juvenile.
  • sounds 15y ago
    You mean securing international copyright protection? The article is completely satisfactory with regard to all other legal "hurdles": "The only people who would find this sort of thing acceptable are the legal teams, administrators and royalty-collecting intermediaries who need this sort of relentlessly stupid convolution to maintain their positions." Copyright protection is easy to secure, and is not a barrier to entry into foreign markets. http://www.google.com/search?q=how+to+secure+international+copyright http://www.google.com/search?q=how+to+secure+international+c...
  • sophacles 15y ago
    At the end of the day, you're not entitled to everything everyone else has. To think so is just juvenile. An equally valid criticism to apply to any attempt at perfect copyright enforcement. Or to keep copyright in the same bullshit state it is in. Or to not innovate to keep up with the technology. Or to exert claims over a business model's viability. And on and on.
  • GFischer 15y ago
    Living in a small, oft-forgotten country (Uruguay) I realize that there isn't a big enough incentive to do the legal work, and it's totally understandable from that perspective (distribution and collection are not the main problems IMO, the big one is legal). However, I will argue that current IP practices are hurting us. It does bring the quality of life down for the citizens of the country, and sometimes it's not just a song which is not available, it's a needed piece of software you just can't purchase legally - as an example, the Business Software Alliance branded as "illegal" a copy of a certain software package in a company I worked for because it was purchased in the U.S. and used in Uruguay, even though it was paid for. So now said company has to use a clearly inferior software package. It also adds a drop to the bucket to our ability to recruit abroad (people aren't as happy when they learn that their money buys much less and far more expensive, and with lots of availability issues - want the latest and greatest? Either pay through the nose if possible, or smuggle it. I wish there were good IP treaties that allowed us to buy abroad. Barring that, I'll have to keep hoping for a non-pipe dream Mercosur (EU equivalent) or being absorbed by Brazil or (god forbid) Argentina.
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• frasertimo 15y ago
  And at the same time on HN there's a link to Aziz Ansari's new standup special which I can buy for $5, despite the fact that I live in 'lil old New Zealand. Tim Cushing is right; I don't want to hear your ramblings about licensing or rights. The fact is, Aziz and Louis CK can do it; why can't the music labels?
• noonespecial 15y ago
  It starts to feel a bit like digital "skin color" and "we don't serve your kind here". History may not be kind to the status quo.
• DngrZnExpswy 15y ago
  It speaks to me viscerally. I often find myself seething with anger that although I have paid what I consider unfairly high prices, (e.g. $77/month for satellite and some specialty channels Idon't watch but cannot escape, in order to watch Game of Thrones and the occasional filler program, and finding myself pirating the show anyway for ease of watching, and extra costs for producing amateur plays whose professional authors are long dead and whose rights are owned by an entity with no discernible purpose other than making more money) and and with the knowledge the money isn't supporting who I want it to support (i.e. the artist/creator), and having access restricted to free ad supported content because of where I live, which is as this article points out; insane. I feel as though we are still in the birth or staging period of the ideas that were conceived with Napster and the like. There is profit for all to be made in digital media and the phrase 'digital media' represents a far broader swathe of culture than people outside this type of community seem to realize. The profit lies in the value the product adds to the culture and intellect or distraction of the consumers and nowhere else. If someone is valued by society for their contributions then, like the artists of old, they will find themselves supported by the population in one way or another. Every other way to squeeze profit out of what is essentially non-human entertainment (i.e. once digitized the content can be recreated without another human adding any value to the work) is just a way ensuring that the less talented will continue to make less meaningful art at the expense of the whole society. What Napster, and by extension the whole internet, did was generate a source and medium through which the mass individual could self determine quality and be exposed to more genres and therefore the ideas of musicians than what was ever before possible. It's major flaw, legality notwithstanding, was that it limited itself to music. The same approach clearly applies to all form of media that can be reproduced. Clearly the repercussions of this way of thinking would destroy industries and create a new paradigm that the would will take some getting used to, if what I described were practically applied. Ultimately, I believe it will be resolved in a massive anti-trust case against the ever larger music labels/studios/cable giants/ISP's worldwide that will limit their monopolies and finally reflect the global nature of their industries. We are seeing the dawn of a global culture. One that will survive and change so long as the human race does. To place a monetary value on access to that culture is not sustainable and will not last. IMHO lol